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This paper aims to outline strategies for defence against social engineering that are missing in the current best practices of information technology (IT) security. Reason for the incomplete training techniques in IT security is the interdisciplinary of the field. Social engineering is focusing on exploiting human behaviour, and this is not sufficiently addressed in IT security. Instead, most defence strategies are devised by IT security experts with a background in information systems rather than human behaviour. The authors aim to outline this gap and point out strategies to fill the gaps.

The authors conducted a literature review from viewpoint IT security and viewpoint of social psychology. In addition, they mapped the results to outline gaps and analysed how these gaps could be filled using established methods from social psychology and discussed the findings.

The authors analysed gaps in social engineering defences and mapped them to underlying psychological principles of social engineering attacks, for example, social proof. Furthermore, the authors discuss which type of countermeasure proposed in social psychology should be applied to counteract which principle. The authors derived two training strategies from these results that go beyond the state-of-the-art trainings in IT security and allow security professionals to raise companies’ bars against social engineering attacks.

The training strategies outline how interdisciplinary research between computer science and social psychology can lead to a more complete defence against social engineering by providing reference points for researchers and IT security professionals with advice on how to improve training.

In light of the growing interest in neuroscience within the managerial and organizational cognition (MOC) scholarly domain at large, this chapter advances current knowledge on core neuroscience methods. It does so by building on the theoretical analysis put forward by Healey and Hodgkinson (2014, 2015), and by offering a thorough – yet accessible – methodological framework for a better understanding of key cognitive and social neuroscience methods. Classifying neuroscience methods based on their degree of resolution, functionality, and anatomical focus, the chapter outlines their features, practicalities, advantages and disadvantages. Specifically, it focuses on functional magnetic resonance imaging, electroencephalography, magnetoencephalography, heart rate variability, and skin conductance response. Equipped with knowledge of these methods, researchers will be able to further their understanding of the potential synergies between management and neuroscience, to better appreciate and evaluate the value of neuroscience methods, and to look at new ways to frame old and new research questions in MOC. The chapter also builds bridges between researchers and practitioners by rebalancing the hype and hopes surrounding the use of neuroscience in management theory and practice.

This book comprises the second volume in the recently launched New Horizons in Managerial and Organizational Cognition book series. Volume 1 (Sund, Galavan, & Huff, 2016), addressed the topic of strategic uncertainty. This second volume comprises a collection of contributions that variously report new methodological developments in managerial and organizational cognition, reflect critically on those developments, and consider the challenges that have yet to be confronted in order to further advance this exciting and dynamic interdisciplinary field. Contextualizing within an overarching framework the various contributions selected for inclusion in the present volume, in this opening chapter we reflect more broadly on what we consider the most significant developments that have occurred over recent years and the most significant challenges that lie ahead.

This chapter introduces electroencephalography (EEG), a measure of neurophysiological activity, as a critical method for investigating individual and team decision-making and cognition. EEG is a useful tool for expanding the theoretical and research horizons in organizational cognitive neuroscience, with a lower financial cost and higher portability than other neuroimaging methods (e.g., functional magnetic resonance imaging). This chapter briefly reviews past work that has applied cognitive neuroscience methods to investigate cognitive processes and outcomes. The focus is on describing contemporary EEG measures that reflect individual cognition and compare them to complementary measures in the field of psychology and management. The authors discuss how neurobiological measures of cognition relate to and may predict both individual cognitive performance and team cognitive performance (decision-making). This chapter aims to assist scholars in the field of managerial and organizational cognition in understanding the complementarity between psychological and neurophysiological methods, and how they may be combined to develop new hypotheses in the intersection of these research fields.

The competition in the academe has always been tough, but today, the academe seems to be more like an industry than an academic community as academics are evaluated through quantified and economic means.

This article leans on Heidegger’s thoughts on the essence of technology and his ontological view on being to show the dangers that lie in this quantification of researchers and research.

Despite the benefits that information systems (ISs) offer to people and research, it seems that technology has made it possible to objectify researchers and research. This has a negative impact on the academe and should thus be looked into especially by the IS field, which should note the problems that exist in its core. This phenomenon of quantified academics is clearly visible at academic quantification sites, where academics are evaluated using metrics that count their output. It seems that the essence of technology has disturbed the way research is valued by emphasising its quantifiable aspects. The study claims that it is important to look for other ways to evaluate researchers rather than trying to maximise research production, which has led to the flooding of articles that few have the time or interest to read.

This paper offers new insights into the current phenomenon of quantification of academics and underlines the need for critical changes if in order to achieve the academic culture that is desirable for future academics.

Sponsorships targeting an internal audience, e.g. employees, are still under-researched. The purpose of this paper is to investigate how employees perceive and evaluate a sponsorship that is designed with the purpose of improving customer services and explore how the company may benefit from the sponsorship.

The study is anchored in critical realism and based on a single case study using multiple methods. The authors survey the impact of the sponsorship on employees’ (n=653) perceptions of their ability to communicate with customers, to perform their personal best, to engage in teamwork, as well as employee retention. The authors use individual and group interviews to qualify the analysis and the access to company data on customer satisfaction rates to provide an indication of the effect of the sponsorship.

Results indicate that close to half the employees respond that the campaign positively impacted their ability to communicate, improve personal performance and to engage in teamwork. The analysis also reveals that the commitment of the direct leader has an impact on employees’ interest and commitment to the campaign. Data on customer satisfaction show that reducing the number of dissatisfied customers and increasing the number of customers willing to recommend the company to others has been accomplished, thus indicating that the sponsorship has had a positive impact on company performance.

By combining sponsorship research with insights from the HRM literature, the study provides empirically based knowledge to the hitherto limited research on the internal audience of sponsorships. The study provides a plausible indication of a positive relation between a sponsorship design and company performance.

The aim of this paper is to move toward a holistic model of organizational interpretation under uncertainty. This paper makes a series of novel conceptual propositions regarding the associations between state, effect and response uncertainty and the organizational interpretation process.

This conceptual paper extends existing conceptual work by distinguishing between general and issue-specific scanning and linking the interpretation process to three different types of perceived uncertainty: state, effect and response uncertainty.

It is proposed that environmental scanning leads to lower state and effect uncertainty, i.e. less uncertainty regarding the estimation of probabilities of events occurring in the external environment of the organization and of their consequences. It is further proposed that scanning leads to higher levels of perceived control over events and that the actual interpretation of events, in opportunity/threat terms, drives irregular issue-specific scanning and organizational reactions to such events.

The paper suggests a way to test links between organizational interpretation and uncertainty that might help explain and untangle some of the conflicting empirical results found in the extant literature. The paper illustrates how the literature could benefit from re-conceptualizing the perceived environmental uncertainty construct to take into account different types of uncertainty.

For practitioners, this paper emphasizes the importance of environmental scanning and how scanning practices can lead to general alertness, to more positive event interpretations and how interpretations form responses to opportunities in the environment.

This paper extends on existing work by linking the interpretation process to three different types of uncertainty (state, effect and response uncertainty) with several novel and testable propositions. The paper also differentiates clearly general (regular) scanning from issue-specific (irregular) scanning. Finally, the paper provides a unifying view, piecing together in one picture elements that have so far been dispersed in the literature.

What kinds of support do interstate rivals provide to domestic actors in ongoing civil wars? And how do domestic actors utilize the support they receive? This chapter answers these questions by comparing Iranian and Saudi military and non-military (mediation, foreign aid and religious soft-power promotion) support to the Houthis and to the Government of Yemen (GoY) during the Saada wars (2004–2010) and the internationalized civil war (2015–2018). It also focuses on the processes through which the GoY and the Houthis have utilized this support for their own strategic purposes. This chapter applies a structured, focused comparison methodology and relies on data from a review of both primary and secondary sources complemented by 14 interviews. This chapter finds that there were less external interventions in the conflict in Saada than in the internationalized civil war. During the latter, a broader set of intervention strategies enabled further instrumentalization by domestic actors, which in turn contributed to the protracted nature of the conflict. This chapter contributes to the literature on interstate rivalry and third-party intervention. The framework of analysis is applicable to civil wars that experience intervention by rivals, such as Syria or Libya.

Great uncertainty accompanies entrepreneurs’ processes of designing promising business models (BMs). Therefore, stabilising factors act as important means in this process. In this study, we examined the impact of cognitive dispositions and visual BM frameworks on the BM process and outcomes. By using partial-least-square structural equation modelling (PLS-SEM) and an experimental setting, our results show that the stabilising function of BM frameworks depends on entrepreneurs’ cognitive dispositions. This finding contributes to the cognitive BM perspective and explains how cognitive dispositions and visual framing effects act as boundary conditions for the theory of stabilising factors. This also has important implications for applying frameworks in practice.